Sadly, Zero Motivation is the worst kind of mixed bag. Written and directed by Talya Lavie, the first woman to produce a film in Israel, Zero Motivation follows a pair of young women through three loosely connected stories about their two years of mandatory service in the Israeli military. The film is one of those slice-of-life workplace comedies that feels semi-autobiographical and satirizes the peculiar procedures...

Project Almanac understands that what people really want in a time-travel movie are long stretches of people soldering circuit boards and buying batteries. I mean, why waste time pondering temporal paradoxes when audiences just want to sit back and marvel at the thrill of people drawing circles on a chalkboard? Director Dean Israelite and writers Andrew Deutschman and Jason Pagan have finally freed science-fiction...

Are zebras white with black stripes or black with white stripes? Is “The Daily Show” a news program with some comedy in it or a comedy program with some news in it? Is Blackhat a bad movie with a lot of good parts or a good movie with a lot of bad parts? The world may never know…but let’s try to figure it out, shall we?

Opening with a hypnotic computer sequence that feels like an episode of “How It’s Made” that’s...